Groesbeck Style Motorsports Festival Is Coming Back To Texas!

By the time the first car howled past the stockade walls of Old Fort Parker in September 2020, it was obvious this was not your average Texas car meet. Groesbeck, a small town in Limestone County better known for frontier history than lap records, had been transformed into a vintage motorsport experiment by yours truly. The Groesbeck Grand Prix brought a 1.2-mile closed-road time trial to a ribbon of Texas park road that finished at the reconstructed pioneer fort, with a concours field of just 50 invited cars parked inside the wooden walls.

The original Groesbeck Grand Prix poster and promotional photo from 2020

It was a strange, wonderful collision of eras. Outside the fort, race cars queued for runs at speed. Inside, judges walked among everything from pre-war Cadillacs to modern Aston Martins while families browsed vendors and food trucks. The idea was simple: bridge the gap between concours lawns and real competition, give spectators a chance to see historic machinery doing the one thing it was built to do.

Paul Hagger in his Chevron B23 at the original Groesbeck Grand Prix

Groesbeck, The Goodwood of Texas?

In the run-up to that first event, more than one outlet noted the ambition of trying to build a “Goodwood-style” festival in the middle of Texas. The Drive went so far as to headline it as a Goodwood-style motorsports festival, calling out the time trials, rally elements, and the spectator village at the fort. It was a monumental undertaking, especially considering my wedding was just a few weeks away.

Over the Labor Day weekend of 2020, the idea proved itself. Historic racers from across the country turned up: NASCAR veteran Mike Powell with his race-winning 1963 Ford Fairlane, Paul Hagger in the Chevron B23 that once won at Fuji Speedway, plus a field of MGs, Porsches, Fiats, and Austin Healeys.

By Sunday afternoon, there were Groesbeck course records to talk about. In modern machinery, Craig McCormick hustled his Mustang to a 47.34-second benchmark. In historic class, Hagger’s Chevron laid down a 48.12-second run that would set the bar for future years. There was more going on than lap times. The Mexia Concours inside the fort, club rallies from Dallas, Austin, and Houston, on-site camping, and a charity tie-in with Drive Toward a Cure all hinted at something bigger than a one-off hillclimb. The idea that took root in Groesbeck was this: Texas deserved its own heritage motorsport culture, built on real roads, real history, and a community of drivers who wanted more than just cars and coffee.

From One Weekend to the Groesbeck Sports Car Club

The Groesbeck Grand Prix quickly picked up a reputation among vintage racers and enthusiasts. Supercars.net, Sports Car Digest, ClassicCars.com, and regional media all covered the event, often repeating the same themes: intimate, authentic, different from anything else in the state. Even after later editions of the Grand Prix faced headwinds and a 2021 cancellation, local news coverage pointed out that the community that had formed around it was not going away.

The fans, racers, and vendors all kept asking what happened to Groesbeck. We attempted to return to the same site the following year. In fact, we started the planning immediately, only to be met with a demand to pay six times the original rental fee. For the record, the event ended up costing me over $800 out of pocket when it was all said and done, so it wasn’t a money maker, it was about building something special in the small town I had chosen to be my adopted hometown, the town I had invested in restoring a historic building in, and the city my parents moved to. The management of Old Fort Parker hadn’t done anything they had been contracted to do, from mowing the field for parking to even cleaning the porta-potties, leaving us with little parking for spectators and having to bring in backup rental toilets at the last minute. In the end, the people liked it, local businesses loved it, and the crowd wanted more.

Sadly, it was small-town politics and an unwillingness of county and city leadership to step up and take responsibility for the mismanagement of Old Fort Parker that had allowed it to happen for decades. Drivers and fans kept asking the same question: what comes next? The answer arrived in the form of a new banner.

The Groesbeck Sports Car Club

Rather than remain tied to a single piece of road in Limestone County, the core team behind the Grand Prix and I began to think bigger. What if the format could move and evolve? What if the spirit of that first weekend at Old Fort Parker could become a club, with events across Texas and beyond?

The Groesbeck Sports Car Club was built to do precisely that. GSCC exists to celebrate “the thrill of driving and the heritage of motorsport,” with a focus on historic time trials, rallies, and curated road events that are deliberately more intimate than modern pro racing, yet far more visceral than a static show.

Membership is capped and geared towards drivers who actually intend to drive their cars. Annual members receive early entry, discounted fees, and a GSCC competition license that carries real weight at club events. The organization is based in Central Texas, and we openly state our ambition to host events across Texas, as well as into Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, scouting for unique roads and historically rich backdrops. If the Grand Prix was the proof of concept, GSCC is the structure that lets the idea travel.

But creating something like this hasn’t been easy. Over the last two years, our team has reached out to hundreds of cities, counties, park departments, airports, and even private landowners to find a place that wasn’t just willing, but also able to host a motorsports festival like we envisioned. While many locations were interested, complications with county, state, and even federal regulators meant that any motorsports event was a no-go. So, we just kept knocking on doors.

Riverside Park and the Victoria Shakedown

To build toward something on the scale of Goodwood for a new era, you need a course that feels special before the first car even turns a wheel. In Victoria, Texas, GSCC believes it has found that. Riverside Park sweeps along four and a half miles of the Guadalupe River and packs 660 acres of woodland, picnic grounds, ballfields, a zoo, and a dedicated special events area into one park. The roads that twist through that landscape have long been a favorite of locals for Sunday drives and fun runs.

In November 2025, GSCC quietly hosted the Riverside Park Time Trial, its first official event under the new organization. The club describes it as a “precision-driven time trial along the scenic roads of Riverside Park,” an invitational shakedown that allowed organizers, drivers, and city officials to see how vintage cars, safety infrastructure, and spectators all interact in the park’s natural amphitheater. City officials even got to ride along with professional racing drivers.

Even though the event was not promoted to the general public, word quickly spread, and locals began to show up to watch race cars at high speeds. From regional car clubs to families who had followed the echo of exhaust notes, we quickly had dozens of spectators arriving every hour, all of whom were enthusiastic and excited about the prospect of this event becoming an annual festival.

A Goodwood-style festival on the Gulf Prairie

GSCC’s long-term vision is clear in its public messaging and social channels. The club talks about “true road racing” brought into reach for owners of classic machines, about creating immersive festivals where spectators get better vantage points and more authentic experiences than they would from a distant grandstand. The planned festival in Victoria for Spring 2026 is conceived as the next evolution of the Grand Prix concept. Instead of rallying around a single fort, the event will stretch along the riverfront and through Riverside Park’s special events areas. Picture a long weekend where:

Historic and modern classic race cars run timed sprints on a closed section of park road that snakes under oaks and alongside the Guadalupe. A curated concours field sets up near the pavilions, with Texas sun lighting up pre-war sports cars, sixties GT machines, and oddball prototypes.

Club rallies from Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and the Coast converge for display parking and parade laps. Vendors, local restaurants, and regional distilleries turn the paddock into a small town in motion.

The goal is not to copy Goodwood note for note, so much as to translate that ethos into Texas. Period racing cars. Drivers who actually lean on them. A crowd that comes for the sounds and smells as much as the Instagram shots. And a setting that ties it all to a specific piece of Texas history, just as the Grand Prix did at Old Fort Parker.

Drivers who ran Groesbeck back in 2020 will recognize the DNA; the focus on time trials instead of wheel-to-wheel chaos. The limited-entry lists value character and provenance over raw horsepower; the desire to make a small town part of the story, not just the backdrop. The plan is to build out more unique events for GSCC members to take part in, from classic airport races to loose surface rallys for classic cars, to perhaps some wheel-to-wheel track racing. The overall winner will receive the McCormick Cup, named after the first overall winner of the Groesbeck Grand Prix, Craig McCormick.

From Fort Parker to the Guadalupe

In just a few years, a simple idea in a small town has turned into a club with regional ambitions. What started as the Groesbeck Grand Prix has evolved into the Groesbeck Sports Car Club, featuring a growing calendar, a membership model, and a roadmap that points directly to a Goodwood-style festival weekend in Victoria.

The setting has changed from cedar stockade walls to river bluffs and oak canopies, but the core remains the same: Texas roads, proper cars, and people who still believe that the best way to honor automotive history is to drop the green flag and let it breathe.